Canvas: Did the AWS outage bring it down?

Monday’s service disruption at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud hosting and data service, affected everything from Verizon to Venmo to United Airlines. While the issues were mostly alleviated by Monday afternoon, the popular Learning Management System (LMS) Canvas was still struggling at that time.

Canvas has been reposting essentially the same updatesince the morning of Oct. 20: “We are continuing to work with Amazon Web Services looking into our Canvas, Mastery Connect and other Instructure products being down[.] ”

Utilized by students, teachers, professors, and administrators, Canvas is a software system that allows remote access to syllabi, assignments, and grading. Outages of Canvas were widespread on Monday, from California State University, Fullerton, to Indiana University Bloomington.

Canvas, one of the most widely used education tech platforms, is owned by Salt Lake City–based Instructure Holdings, Inc.

Check back here for updates.